In response, their hands gripped the fashioned weapons. Coarse and weathered-looking, with embedded cracks in the skin and thick calluses along the sides, these hands were unremarkable, ordinary, and as they glanced at them they wondered if the fears were true. Yet these were hands that had picked the burrs from cotton as dew stuck to their bloodied fingers. They had stripped tobacco leaves, milked cows, slaughtered hogs, gripped battling blocks, and beat their clothes clean. They had shucked and planted and sowed. They had chopped down trees for firewood and carried the heavy logs through the winter snow so the others wouldn’t freeze. They were hands that had helped those who’d suffered the tail of the whip. They had comforted and healed, these hands, and later, for those who’d died, they were the hands to bury the bodies of the lost.

Take one of these hands and bend the fingers into a palm, curling the fingers inward. Bend the thumb until it is against the others, and a hand, once unremarkable, once ordinary, now becomes a fist.

Better to blunt these thoughts instead and be grateful for what you’ve been given, their brethren tried to convince them, but this was a lie told to justify the refusal of what must be done. No shuck and jive would ever break their chains. They’d never yessir and mistah their way to freedom. Even prayer may have once given hope, but they understood hope was a thing to take. No one would give it. Not someday, not ever, so they would make their someday now. It was time to make it and be free. No one else was going to save them. They were the ones. Always had been and always would be. They were the ones who must save themselves.

XXIV.

MIRA SCREAMED, UNABLE to keep it in any longer. Over the years she’d tried so hard to forget his face—the way his hands kept touching the skin to keep it from falling off, the way the skin glistened from blood as it dripped down his neck, how he’d smiled as he licked his lips over the carved flesh. The muscles in Mira’s chest tightened. Her throat constricted. She let out as much sound as she could before her body’s response from the trauma took over, and then, defensively, she clenched herself into a ball and sobbed.

“Mira? Mira, I’m here. Are you all right? Can you hear me? I’m here. It’s Jesse, Mira. Come on, open your eyes and see. It’s me.”